One of the core features of Stat involves the application of Oracle Ebusiness patches. Tracking what patches have been applied to which instances and identifying differences can be a manual and challenging task. Through the use of Stat’s Environment Patch Compare Reports, you can simplify this task as well as present it in an intelligent and easy to use view. I am going to discuss how it works in Stat and what you need to do to take full advantage of it.

Whether you apply all your patches with Stat or have used the ‘Undocumented Patch Wizard’ (see other document in series) this is a quick and easy way to determine what patches (or differences) are in your environment. This should help alleviate the need to track patches manually via spreadsheets.

To access the Environment Patch Level Compare Reports you will first need to go into the OraApps Patch Console by navigating to Consoles/OraApps Patch Console.

Next navigate to the ‘Environment History’ tab. To access the Reports select the ‘Compare’ button on the right-hand side.

After selecting ‘Compare’ it will open the “Environment Patch Level Compare Report’. Here you can select the report criteria. Depending on the report you may select one or many environments. Using the ‘Green’ Checkbox selects all environments. To select or deselect environments hold the ‘Ctrl’ key.

The various report options are displayed on the right side. Each report will be comprised of both top and lower level options. The top level allows you to run reports that show patches as of a specific date or all patches regardless of date. The bottom options allow you to ‘Include All Patches’ or just show “Only Patch Differences.’ The ‘Grid Compare’ option allows you to see the report in a grid format.

Here is an example of a report showing all patches regardless of date for both the Dev and Prod Environments. Note that they are listed by environment but you can sort by any column by clicking on it.

Here is an example of the same report showing all patches regardless of date for both the Dev and Prod Environments using the “Grid Compare’ option.

Here is an example of a report showing ‘Only Patch Differences’ for both the Dev and Prod Environments. This report can quickly isolate any differences between the environments. As long as you have run the ‘Undocumented Patch Wizard’ after any patches were applied manually outside of Stat, this report will be accurate. This report has identified two patches that were applied to Dev and not to Prod.

Note: You may print the results or export the results to various formats using the icons on the top right as seen below:

You now understand how to run and use the ‘Environment Patch Level Compare Reports’ and can now thoroughly report on all patches applied as well as any patch differences between one, many, or all your environments.

Please feel free to ask me questions about this if you need more details.